(Swans - January 2, 2012)
"If we can stop thinking about what the future might bring and embrace the
present for what it is, we would be a lot better off," reasons John Gray in his
Christmas Day editorial posted on the Internet by the BBC News Magazine, "A
Point of View: The endless obsession with what might be." Gray is an English political
philosopher who compares the ideas of Francis Fukuyama and Arthur Koestler to
develop his argument, and justify his conclusion:

The task that faces us is no different from the one that has always faced
human beings -- renewing our lives in the face of recurring evils. Happily, the
end never comes. Looking to an end-time is a way of failing to cherish the
present -- the only time that is truly our own.

This is pure Zen. Also, it is exactly the perspective Raymond Aron gave in
both The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) and Politics and History (1978,
especially the essay "Machiavelli and Marx"). Aron criticized the
Christian-like historicism of Marxists, and said that "politics" not
"revolution" would always be the order of the day, since people would
perennially have to address the problems of the present rather than hoping for
"salvation," or waiting for a presumed historical inevitability to deliver "a
revolution" that would produce Nirvana: an ideal society in perpetual stasis,
the end of history, "heaven."

The Machiavelli view (we avoid the pejorative "Machiavellian") is that so long
as human psychology remains unchanged (which seems true for the last 200,000
years of Homo sapiens) there will be human conflicts regardless of the
specifics of the forms of government and relationships of power, economics,
and social structures. Thus, compromises and consensus of any kind are always
provisional and will always have to be revised, or even totally changed,
"later." In a nominally peaceful and well-managed society, this would be the
day-to-day norm of managing collective life on every scale: local, state,
regional, global.

From Carl G. Jung's theory of personality types, "P" style people, who
naturally deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, "sloppiness" and improvisation
more easily than "J" type people, who like certainty, finality, "forms" and
hierarchy, will more readily adapt to living in a situation of "managed
fluidity" necessary for the continuing operation of a collective enterprise
that involves groups with competing interests. The obsession with "the future"
is very much a J characteristic ("getting things settled," "getting things
organized," "nailing it down"). Jung made the point that the successful
achievement of psychological maturity (physical development plus experience,
by age 37 he estimated) led one to possess a balanced personality, one that
incorporated both J and P styles of decision-making rather than being lopsided
by remaining with one's default strong suit from birth ("infantile behavior").
Life -- individual and collective -- is a process, its only finality is death,
the end of the conscious processes considered here. The Zen Buddhists say the
past and future are illusions, you only actually breathe and can have awareness
(the two indictors of life) in the present. To not be "in the moment" (which
we interpret for practical political purposes as: in the social situations of
current times) is to waste some of your limited time of aliveness to
delusions, by distracting yourself with the unrecoverable (the past) or the
unattainable (the distant "perfect" future).

Delusions of the future include the Christian heaven and the Marxist
end-of-history with the triumph of historically inevitable socialism, a
determinism set by the presumed inevitable collapse of capitalism due to its
internal contradictions, and society's rebirth by the ascendancy of the
proletariat. Both of these cults of the future instill a passivity in their
believers. For Christians, to not seek rewards "on Earth" but to accept
temporal authority, keep the faith, and reap rewards in the afterlife.
Marxists can be filled with smugness, from their belief that they know
history's script for the delivery of their heaven, and they need only await
for history's train to pull events past them till their boarding call is
sounded and they can take their seating in the vanguard coach; no point
wasting time in the here and now with "reformism" for a capitalist system that
will only be swept away, and "soon."

The managed fluidity I mentioned earlier is entirely the practice of karma
yoga: the merging with (yoga) the consequences of our acts (karma). Once this
is an established practice, we are simultaneously solving our legacy problems
while preventing many new ones from arising, by anticipatory awareness. We
accept that we will never have no problems, or that we can ever solve them all
"for good." We do what is possible at the moment to prevent creating lingering
difficulties, and to minimize those we still have. This is the daily reality
that will always be true. This reality can always be made worse by our
collective obtuseness; but even if we manage the flow of our collective
reality with collective elegance, we can be assured that so long as Earth
harbors human life, the conflicts of maintaining our collectivity will never be
eliminated.

Obsessing about the future, as discussed by John Gray, is simply an evasion
from dealing with reality. The static Nirvana of political imagination is a
delusion; the only possibly achievable Nirvana is an unending dynamic
reformism.

Gilles d'Aymery pointed me to John Gray's article, a thoughtful suggestion for which I thank him.

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Manuel García, Jr. on Swans. He is a native of the upper upper west side barrio of the 1950s near Riverside Park in Manhattan, New York City, and a graduate engineering physicist who specialized in the physics of fluids and electricity. He retired from a 29 year career as an experimental physicist with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the first fifteen years of which were spent in underground nuclear testing. An avid reader with a taste for classics, and interested in the physics of nature and how natural phenomena can impact human activity, he has long been interested in non-fiction writing with a problem-solving purpose. García loves music and studies it, and his non-technical thinking is heavily influenced by Buddhist and Jungian ideas. A father of both grown children and a school-age daughter, today García occupies himself primarily with managing his household and his young daughter's many educational activities. García's political writings are left wing and, along with his essays on science-and-society, they have appeared in a number of smaller Internet magazines since 2003, including Swans. Please visit his personal Blog at manuelgarciajr.wordpress.com. (back)